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A number of people pointed out the Key Katcher at ThinkGeek to me yesterday. I”d love to get my hands on one of these to try it out, but it seems very simple. I wondered how long it would take the average user to generate 130,000 keystrokes – how easy or frequent does rerieval need to be if you’re hoping to catch a password?
Of course, the product description doesn’t mention that as a use, focusing on putting it on your own machine to identify if an unauthorized user accessed it, or for sys admins to use to see what exactly triggered a problem.

I originally intended just to point out this interesting post about the success of “ugly” design, arguing that unattractive sites such as del.icio.us are successful because the lack of design communicates to the user a lack of marketing or corporate influence.
But then I found a response to the conversation that I liked even more: disambiguity’s separating of information/interaction design from visual design. And, having just talked to one of my classes about the distinction between logical versus physical tags and why one might use one over the other, I liked seeing the point made that a site with good information and interaction design but poor visual design can succeed (and the ugly design examples given in the first link would fall in that catagory) whereas good visual design without good information and interaction design will fail. Of course, the ideal is to have both, but what this conversation is really about is the fact that it is rare to have both, and so there is a clear prefernce for which to focus on, if you will only do one.
Also worth reading is the contrast of the old and redesigned Craig’s List at the bottom of the disambiguity article.

The ACM technology policy weblog has a nice summary of and response to H.R. 4127 regarding stronger data security requirements for businesses. The highlights include requiring data security plans and notification if security is breached.
But be sure to scan down for their discussion of the exemption from notification if the compromised data is encrypted, and why this is a dangerous loophole.
It reminds me of a recent experience talking about security principles to a general audience – one of the hardest concepts to get them to accept was the idea that redundant or layered security is necessary, and single potential points of failure must be avoided. There is definitely a perception that there should be some tool or technique for ensuring security. Here, data encryption seems to be the magic bullet.

A recent article discusses the goal of building AI that anticipates user desires, opening with the following teaser:

MANY viewers were probably impressed when a character on Star Trek asked a computer for a cup of tea and it was produced immediately.
Not Kristian Hammond. “I wondered why he had to ask,” says Hammond, co-director of America’s Northwestern University intelligent information computer lab. “A truly intelligent machine would anticipate that its operator wanted tea.”

If you read the rest of the article, you see that their actual project is a bit more sensible in scope, looking at how AI can refine information search and extraction based on contextual knowledge about a user – either historical or current. It’s particularly interesting that there seems to be interest in having the tool search out information about the user as well to inform the refinement process. But after the introduction to the article, I couldn’t help but think of the following quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about the Nutrimatic drink dispenser:

When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Like Google Earth, but with fewer roads so far (though, you can check up on the locations of Spirit and Opportunity): Google Mars! Check out both an elevation-shaded and an actual image at an impressive range of zooms. At this point only covers a limited chunk of the western hemisphere. They hope to tie it into the Google Earth client in the future to allow fly-throughs and such.